Visit Dianne Siebold's personal blog on Developer Force

Three Force.com Streaming API Techniques

By Dianne Siebold | Published: May 8, 2012

Streaming API is a great tool for data integration that requires notifications triggered by data changes in your organization. But sometimes, no matter how great a technology is, there may be scenarios that it doesn’t directly address. In this blog post, I’ll talk about some of these scenarios and propose techniques that you can use to address them with Streaming API.

Set the Order of Event Notifications

Changes to data in your organization happen in a sequential manner. But in Streaming API, the order in which you receive event notification messages isn’t guaranteed. So a frequent question that developers ask… Continue reading

In Blog: tech-pubs | Tagged | Leave a comment

REST API Cheat Sheet: It’s Only Cheating if You’re Taking a Test

By Dianne Siebold | Published: February 10, 2012

For all you Force.com REST developers, we have added the REST API Cheat Sheet to our library of cheat sheets. In addition to reference info, it also has quite a few examples of how you can use REST API to update a field, delete a record, search, and so on.

Click here to see all the other cheat sheets.

&nbsp… Continue reading

In Blog: tech-pubs | Leave a comment

Spring ’12 – Top 10 Developer Features

By Dianne Siebold | Published: January 18, 2012

The Spring ’12 release is here, and if you’re a developer, you’re probably asking “what’s in it for me?” The answer is, plenty. Here, in no particular order, is my take on the top 10 features for developers.

  1. SOQL OFFSET (Developer Preview) – This is a new clause on the SOQL SELECT statement that lets you “skip” rows in the returned record set. You can use OFFSET together with LIMIT to break up returned data into blocks of records. Note that OFFSET is applied to the result set returned at the time of the query. There’s no server-side
Continue reading
In Blog: tech-pubs | Tagged , , , , , , , | 9 Comments

Data Loader Source Now on GitHub

By Dianne Siebold | Published: December 14, 2011

As you may or may not know, the source code for Data Loader has always been available on SourceForge. Starting with version 22.0, the Data Loader source is now housed on GitHub.

GitHub provides a collaborative environment where you can follow code projects, see who branched a project, and follow other GitHub users to see what they’re working on.

Of course, you can still download the latest compiled Windows version of Data Loader by going to Your Name > Setup > Data Management > Data Loader (or just Data Management > Data Loader, in Database.com)… Continue reading

In Blog: tech-pubs | Leave a comment

Get Started with Streaming API – Quick!

By Dianne Siebold | Published: November 2, 2011

Are you starting to work with the Force.com Streaming API or perhaps thinking about it? If you want to quickly understand how it works and see it in action, there’s now a quick start available to step you through it.

The quick start is part of the Streaming API Developer’s Guide and can be found here: HTML | PDF.

And don’t forget, the Streaming API – along with all the other APIs – is available on both Force.com and Database.com platforms. For more information about the Streaming API, go to http://developer.force.com/streaming_api… Continue reading

In Blog: tech-pubs | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Salesforce APIs – What They Are & When to Use Them

By Dianne Siebold | Published: October 19, 2011

There are a number of different APIs that developers can use to integrate with a Salesforce organization. But sometimes it’s difficult to know what each API is for and when to use it. To that end, I sat down with Pat Patterson, Principal Developer Evangelist here at Salesforce, to talk about the different APIs that are available.

In our discussion, we wanted to give you an overview of all the API options and also impart some information about when you would want to use each of them.

D: Thanks for joining me today.

P: You bet… Continue reading

In Blog: tech-pubs | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

New Object Reference in Winter ’12 Release

By Dianne Siebold | Published: September 28, 2011

This week’s post comes to you courtesy of Mysti Berry, Principal Technical Writer on the Platform Doc team.

Tired of plowing through the SOAP API Developer’s Guide just to find the information you need about objects and fields? Or maybe you didn’t even know it was there. Now you can find this information easily in the Object Reference.

In the new guide, you’ll find:

  • ERD diagrams
  • Standard object reference pages, including each field
  • Custom object reference information
  • Datatypes summary

 

Preview it now—what do you think?… Continue reading

In Blog: tech-pubs | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Subscribe to Platform Doc Blog in Outlook

By Dianne Siebold | Published: September 16, 2011

Many of you are probably social media mavens and navigate effortlessly from blogs to tweets to texts. For those of you like me, here’s a quick 1-2-3 on how to subscribe to the Platform Doc Team blog in Outlook.

The screenshots are from Outlook 2010, but the process is the same in Outlook 2007.

1.  In the Mail Folders navigation pane on the left, navigate to the RSS Feeds node.
2.  Right-click and select Add a New RSS Feed.
3.  In the New RSS Feed window, enter http://feeds.feedburner.com/developerforce/techpubs and click Add.

4.  Click Yes when… Continue reading

In Blog: tech-pubs | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Hot Off the Presses – Winter ’12 Developer Doc

By Dianne Siebold | Published: September 8, 2011

That’s right, get a sneak peek at what’s coming for developers in the Winter ’12 version. The preview versions of the Winter ’12 release notes and developer guides are now available.

To see the preview release notes, click here.

The preview versions of our developer guides are on the platform documentation page.  On that page, locate the guide you’re interested in and you’ll see links to the preview HTML and PDF.


There are so many new developer features in this release, I can’t possibly list them all, but here are a few highlights… Continue reading

In Blog: tech-pubs | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments

Just Released – Data Loader Command Line Video

By Dianne Siebold | Published: August 17, 2011

Data Loader is a great utility for importing, updating or deleting lots of data in your orgs whether they are Salesforce CRM or Force.com. You can fire it up and step through the UI to do all these tasks.

But it’s rare that you just need to import or update data on a one-off basis. Usually you need to import leads every night or grab updated data from another system on a regular basis. This is where the Data Loader command line comes in handy because you can use it to automate regular data processing tasks.

If you’ve… Continue reading

In Blog: tech-pubs | 1 Comment